Together We Will - Louisville and Southern Indiana: TWW Shero

Who Was Fannie Lou Hamer?

by Tami Harbolt

Born in 1917 in the Mississippi Delta, Fannie Lou Hamer was one of 20 children. Although she had learned to read and write, by adolescence she was a sharecropper like the other members of her family. Along with her husband Pap, Fannie Lou worked on the W.D. Marlow plantation in Sunflower County, MS.

In 1961, Hamer was forcibly sterilized, a common procedure for black women in the county. She had entered the hospital for a minor procedure, but came home after a complete hysterectomy. She was given a hysterectomy while in the hospital for minor surgery, a procedure so common it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” “[In] the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the 10 Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied,” she told a Washington, DC, audience three years later.

In 1963, she became involved in the activities of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in their efforts to register southern blacks to vote. When her boss on the plantation found out she had tried to register to vote (she failed the registration literacy test), he fired her and evicted her family from their rented home. But her bravery drew the attention of other southern activists, and Hamer was recruited by SNCC to organize and register voters in Mississippi.

“On June 9, 1963, Hamer and several fellow activists were returning from a citizenship training program in Charleston, South Carolina, when their bus stopped in Winona, Mississippi. In an act of protest, several members of the group sat at the bus station’s whites-only lunch counter. Before long the police removed them from the café, arresting six people. In jail, several of the activists were beaten by the police and by other African-American inmates, whom the police forced to use blackjack weapons. The damage done to Hamer’s eyes, legs, and kidneys affected her for the rest of her life.” (American Experience 1996-2017)

In 1964, Hamer ran for Congress as a candidate from the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which formed to challenge the pro-segregationist Democratic Party. Her insistence on recognition at the national convention propelled her to even more exposure, and following the passage of The Voting Rights Act of 1965 she spoke up for such issues as farmer’s co-ops, Head Start, and school desegregation. Her health began to decline in the 1970’s, and she passed away in 1977 from complications due to her prison beating and cancer.